


A Friendship Like Love

by flawedamythyst



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-06
Updated: 2011-02-06
Packaged: 2017-10-15 11:23:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/160341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flawedamythyst/pseuds/flawedamythyst
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>A friendship like love is warm; a love like friendship is steady.</i> - Thomas More</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Friendship Like Love

221B Baker Street had one major drawback (other than the body parts scattered throughout the kitchen, but John didn't think he could blame that on the flat) - the heating was appalling. Even when it was working, which was rare, it barely put out enough heat to even warm the radiators. Mrs. Hudson tutted about it and told them she was going to get it replaced in the summer, once she'd put enough by to afford it, but until then there was nothing to be done but endure it. John lived in multiple layers of jumpers and tried not to spend too much time thinking about the Afghan summer with longing.

Sherlock seemed to suffer even more than John. He took to wearing his coat at all times and pulled an endless array of blankets of all shapes, colours and varieties out of his room to wrap around himself while he huddled on the sofa and complained bitterly.

“Don't you have any jumpers?” John asked eventually, after noting that for the fifth night in a row, Sherlock was wearing nothing under his coat but a thin jacket and a shirt.

Sherlock hunched over tighter, wrapping his second blanket more firmly around his shoulders. “No,” he said in a scathing voice, as if the very idea was ridiculous. It probably was – why on earth would Sherlock own anything as practical as a jumper?

John sighed and stood up from his place at the desk, where he was trying to type despite the incipient frostbite in his fingers. He went upstairs to his room (which was even colder than the sitting room. Christ, going to bed was going to be fun), dug out the largest, thickest jumper he could find and brought it back down again.

“Put this on,” he told Sherlock, holding it out to him.

Sherlock regarded the jumper with a distasteful look, as if John was offering him a dead cat. Actually, he'd probably be more appreciative of a dead cat. “That's yours,” he said.

“I'm lending it to you,” said John patiently. “It will still be mine, though,” he added, “so you don't get to set it on fire, or drop acid on it, or harm it in anyway.”

Sherlock reached one hand out of his nest of blankets and took the jumper. “I never intend to do any of those things on purpose,” he said.

John snorted and went back to his laptop. He was trying to write up their last case, but it was hard to think about how to explain why it had seemed like a good idea to follow Sherlock down into the sewers when all he wanted to type was 'holy fuck, it's so cold, how is this even allowed in a civilised country?'

Sherlock struggled into the jumper, trying to keep under his blankets and coat as much as possible while he did so, although he did discard his jacket once he'd pulled on the jumper and rearranged all his other layers. He curled back up around his book – some massive tome on the decomposition rates of bodies – and John was allowed some blissful peace from sulky grumbles for a while.

Not forever, though. The night was getting colder and Sherlock's nest was clearly starting to fail at its job. Sherlock started to pull the blankets tighter and tighter around himself, then tucked his feet underneath his own legs in a weird, contorted position that John was pretty sure anyone else would have to be a yoga master to manage. Eventually, though, he returned to the grumbling.

“Bloody stupid season,” muttered as he pulled part of his third blanket up to cover his head. “Surely the government should be able to do something,” as he shrunk in closer to his book, trying to pull it under his blankets with him while still being able to read the text. “I'm sure Mycroft is behind it all – just trying to spite me.”

John let out a long sigh at that. Hearing a constant monologue about the temperature was not making it any easier for him to ignore his own chilly limbs, or the increasing ache in his shoulder. His bullet wound was even less appreciative of the weather than Sherlock was, and the combination of cold and pain was beginning to make John lose his patience.

Sherlock glared at him as if the weather was his fault. John stared back, trying not to look as if he was contemplating setting Sherlock on fire for the twin benefits of some blessed heat and some peace and quiet.

“Come here,” Sherlock demanded suddenly.

“Why?” asked John warily, not moving. Obeying Sherlock's orders without asking for further information was never a good idea, but Sherlock didn't bother explaining, of course. He never did.

“Bring your laptop,” was all he added.

“You're not using my laptop to get revenge on the government for the weather,” said John firmly. “I think my IP address is probably on too many watch lists already.”

Sherlock looked at him as if he was an idiot. “The laptop's just to keep you occupied,” he said. “Come here.” He was beginning to sound petulant in the way that meant he was only a step away from a full-on sulk, so John picked up his laptop and walked over to the sofa. Sometimes it just wasn't worth arguing.

“What now?” he asked.

“Sit,” commanded Sherlock, moving over slightly so that there was enough room for John against one of the arms of the sofa. “There's no sense in you providing all that body heat if you're on the other side of the room.”

John considered refusing for half a second, but Sherlock really did look truly miserable, and it probably did make the most sense. He sat down with a sigh, setting his laptop on his lap and trying to ignore the way Sherlock immediately curled into his body.

Over the next ten minutes, Sherlock slowly, carefully, insinuated himself completely into John's personal space. He wrapped various blankets around them both as if it was John's temperature he was concerned with, then wriggled various limbs under John's thighs to warm them, finally pulling himself close enough to practically climb into John's lap, his head resting against John's shoulder. It should have been a horribly uncomfortable position, but somehow Sherlock made it look both relaxing and perfectly normal.

John let out a long-suffering sigh. “I can't type now,” he pointed out.

“You weren't writing anything of any interest,” said Sherlock, not moving.

“Sherlock,” said John, trying to work out how to remind him, for the thousandth time, that he had to allow for other people rather than just rearranging the world for his own comfort. It wasn't so much that he minded Sherlock's body heat slowly seeping through his layers, or that he could really be bothered about how they would look right now to an outside observer, he just felt that one of them should at least attempt to stick to the usual social boundaries.

“You're much warmer now too,” said Sherlock, as if that had been his sole aim. “You were thinking about putting gloves on before – you wouldn't have been able to type then, either.”

John had been wondering if he'd be able to get away with gloves. Typical that Sherlock had known that without him saying anything.

“And your shoulder's been hurting,” added Sherlock. “Always does in the cold, but it's been particularly bad tonight.” Also true. Damn him. “Not your leg, though,” Sherlock added in a quieter voice.

“Well, no,” said John with resignation. Sherlock clearly wasn't going to move without a lot more energy than John was willing to expend, so he just gave up and accepted that he was going to spend the evening huddled on the sofa with his flatmate. “It's psychosomatic.”

“So there was never any injury there at all?” asked Sherlock in the casual way that meant he'd been dying to know about it all along.

“No,” said John, and it came out firmer and more forbidding than he'd meant it to. There was silence for a few minutes as John allowed himself to feel every place that he and Sherlock were touching – feet buried under his legs, head resting on his shoulder, the long curl of Sherlock's body contorted against his side – and compared it to the last time he'd been this close to another person. There was a hand looped around his waist that was keeping Sherlock in place, and for a moment it felt like a very different hand, in a very different situation. Dan had always draped his hand like that when they were lying together and trying to find the will to separate before they were missed.

“Not on me, anyway,” he added finally and knew the moment he said it that he was going to have to tell the whole story now. It was too much to expect Sherlock to ignore a hint like that.

Well, maybe it was time to let the truth out into the open. He probably should have told his therapist – he'd known that at the time, but somehow the idea of explaining it to her calm and understanding gaze had made his throat close up until all he could manage was small talk and meaningless polite phrases.

Sherlock kept quiet, prompting for the whole story with nothing more than an expectant air.

“In Afghanistan, I knew a man called Dan Willcox. He was the anaesthesiologist on my team,” started John in as steady a voice as he could manage. Just saying Dan's name again was like pulling a shard of shrapnel out and he could feel the memory of a distant, thumping pain in his leg start up. “We were close. More than close. We were-” he stumbled over how to describe it. “Lovers, I suppose. I don't think either of us would have called it 'boyfriends', or even if it would have continued once we were back home.” He'd hoped, though. He'd had vague thoughts of a flat together in London, but it had seemed so far away - even the idea of London seemed unreal amongst the dust and blood – that he'd never really got any further than that.

He paused and took a deep breath. “There was an ambush and we were sent in to deal with the wounded while the bullets were still flying. There was a man down that we couldn't get to – he was cut off from us by sniper fire, but Dan, he- well. He was a bit of a maniac, really. He was always getting me into all sorts of scrapes by just diving in feet first and expecting me to follow. He ran out to get to him and I went after him.”

The next part was hard to remember, and harder to fit words around. John took a careful breath in through his nose and shifted his leg slightly in an attempt to ease the growing stab of pain, then carried on with determination.

“I was shot. Single bullet to the shoulder, knocked me down and incapacitated me. Dan had made it to where the soldier was sheltering, but he saw me go down and came back for me.” John wasn't sure how he was managing to keep his voice so calm and level, but he had to pause for a moment then. “He was shot before he could get to me. In the leg – right through the femoral artery. He was too far from me to do anything, and I couldn't get to him. Every time I tried to move, the snipers fired – trying to finish us off, no doubt.

“Dan was bleeding out. I could see the blood pumping out of his leg, and he wasn't even trying to hold it in. He was dazed, probably mostly out of it with shock and blood loss, but he was awake. His eyes were open – he was looking at me.” John can still remember his eyes, warm brown flooded out by the black of his pupils and fixed so hard on John that he thought he should have been able to feel it branding his skin. “He didn't look away at all – I'm not even sure he blinked. I could see his wound and how serious it was, and I knew he was dying. I couldn't feel my shoulder at all – I'm not sure I even remembered then that I'd been shot.”

Even the sounds of gunfire had been drowned out by the look in Dan's eyes. There'd been nothing John could do but look back, hold onto his gaze in the hope that it would help.

“It usually takes ten to fifteen minutes for someone to bleed out through the femoral artery. I have no idea how long it took for Dan. It felt like far longer than that.” He could still remember the moment when the light in Dan's eyes had gone out and his eyelids had slumped. He wasn't sure that he'd ever be able to forget it – it certainly haunted his dreams still.

He cleared his throat. “It took them a while longer to be able to reach us – me – with medical assistance, and all that time all I could see was Dan, and the wound that had killed him. I suspect that the shock of my own injury, combined with the trauma, prompted a psychosomatic response. My mind created a phantom pain in order to deal with the emotional one.”

He stopped there. There was little else to tell – Dan's body was sent home to be buried by his family and John was invalided back to Britain, where he bought himself a stick and was unable to explain to anyone why being shot in the shoulder had left him with a limp.

Sherlock hadn't moved or reacted in any way throughout the entire story, and John was just resigning himself to the fact that he'd poured out the most traumatising experience of his life to a man who had fallen asleep, when he finally spoke.

“I think that if I were dying,” he said in a contemplative voice, “I should very much like to be able to see your face.”

Before John could even form a thought on how to react to that, Sherlock was moving again, shuffling around in his blanket nest until his back was pressed against John's chest instead of his head. He dragged one of John's arms around him and settled back with a satisfied noise.

“Comfortable?” asked John, wishing he felt more annoyed about being used as just another piece of the furniture.

“Perfectly,” said Sherlock without a hint of apology. John gave in and shifted to pull Sherlock closer against him, moving his laptop out of the way. After all, if they were going to snuggle on the sofa, he might as well be as comfortable as possible.

Finally letting the story of Dan's death out from where it had been trapped inside his chest had somehow made him feel lighter, and he settled himself around Sherlock's possessive sprawl with a sense of contentment. His shoulder still ached, but the cold was losing against the combined body heat that he and Sherlock had trapped under the blankets, and the pain in his leg was already fading. He'd had winters that were a lot worse.


End file.
